Cider press part III
Today was the big day!
In the morning, I went through about 1 1/2 klapkasse of apples, having to set about 1/3 of them either aside or in the trash -- these apples were picked from the ground two months ago, I'm amazed how they've held up. I filled up the dish rack area in two layers plus the dish rack itself.
This evening, I made sure everything was ready and started with the food processor on the medium grating cutter. Most apples I could just cut in half and dump them right down. Having them land with the peel up made the food processor happier, but they didn't seem to want to do that. I'd dump it regularly into a bowl from which quaryn_dk would assemble them into cheese-cloth wrapped cakes and stack them in the tray. All the apples made for four nice layers of apple cake, ready to press.
Going downstairs, I set up the press and put the tray with the cake in it. It was a little wobbly, but not enough to be a problem. I squeezed with my hands first, a fair amount came out that way, and I had reasonable control of it. The major design flaw arose here: There was not really room enough to make a siphon, so quaryn_dk deftly fetched the sauce drainer from the kitchen and started draining. The result was good-looking, but the process was a bitch.
Now to the real pressing. Inserting 4 (!) pieces of two-by-four (one of them unfortunately not cut to length), I started lowering the jack. This was were the real problems appeared. Mainly, as I was fearing, the plates and cakes started squeezing themselves sideways. The long 2x4 accelerated this process. Also, the cider didn't run along the cake to the front, so suddenly there was an overflow at the back, and I had to quickly address that issue. When I tried to suck the cider out, the plates were in the way - they were squeezing out backwards as well as sideways. Bummer.
Fiddling around, squeezing for a bit then unsqueezing for a bit of adjustment, we managed to get two bottles full when we started to hear sharp cracking sounds. Didn't sound like the creak of wood, so we figured it might be the collecting tray (made of plastic) starting to give. That would spill cider all over. We release the pressure, sucked the last 1/2 bottle out and gave it to our neighbour Kristian as a retainer for his willingness to do some custom ironwork for the purpose.
Taking the cake back up, we squeezed the cake by hand, getting another liter or so of cider. Tried letting it stand in our juice strainer, but it was too squeezed to give much anyway. Remaining cake went to the compost.
Items learned:
Result: About 5 liters of very, very yummy cider.
In the morning, I went through about 1 1/2 klapkasse of apples, having to set about 1/3 of them either aside or in the trash -- these apples were picked from the ground two months ago, I'm amazed how they've held up. I filled up the dish rack area in two layers plus the dish rack itself.
This evening, I made sure everything was ready and started with the food processor on the medium grating cutter. Most apples I could just cut in half and dump them right down. Having them land with the peel up made the food processor happier, but they didn't seem to want to do that. I'd dump it regularly into a bowl from which quaryn_dk would assemble them into cheese-cloth wrapped cakes and stack them in the tray. All the apples made for four nice layers of apple cake, ready to press.
Going downstairs, I set up the press and put the tray with the cake in it. It was a little wobbly, but not enough to be a problem. I squeezed with my hands first, a fair amount came out that way, and I had reasonable control of it. The major design flaw arose here: There was not really room enough to make a siphon, so quaryn_dk deftly fetched the sauce drainer from the kitchen and started draining. The result was good-looking, but the process was a bitch.
Now to the real pressing. Inserting 4 (!) pieces of two-by-four (one of them unfortunately not cut to length), I started lowering the jack. This was were the real problems appeared. Mainly, as I was fearing, the plates and cakes started squeezing themselves sideways. The long 2x4 accelerated this process. Also, the cider didn't run along the cake to the front, so suddenly there was an overflow at the back, and I had to quickly address that issue. When I tried to suck the cider out, the plates were in the way - they were squeezing out backwards as well as sideways. Bummer.
Fiddling around, squeezing for a bit then unsqueezing for a bit of adjustment, we managed to get two bottles full when we started to hear sharp cracking sounds. Didn't sound like the creak of wood, so we figured it might be the collecting tray (made of plastic) starting to give. That would spill cider all over. We release the pressure, sucked the last 1/2 bottle out and gave it to our neighbour Kristian as a retainer for his willingness to do some custom ironwork for the purpose.
Taking the cake back up, we squeezed the cake by hand, getting another liter or so of cider. Tried letting it stand in our juice strainer, but it was too squeezed to give much anyway. Remaining cake went to the compost.
Items learned:
- Very important: The collecting tray must be custom made to have some sort of spigot or spout that can be plugged and preferably have a tube mounted.
- Some sort of plate control is absolutely necessary. The rails could probably have worked had the bottom plate been custom designed to allow them to fit in.
- Reversing the setup so it presses upwards would give a much better working height, but also make stability more of an issue and would make turning the jack very difficult. We could put the 2x4s below the bottom plate to raise it, that would require very little remounting and at least improve the working height.
- When the top of the food processor starts showing juice, it's full, and that's about enough for a cake.
- The medium shredder is fine for shredding.
- The cheese cloth works beautifully.
- One should weigh the apples going in before starting the shredding to get an estimate of the apple-to-cider ratio. We use much fewer bottles that I had prepared.
Result: About 5 liters of very, very yummy cider.